No Man's Sky

In 2014, Sean Murray came out on Sony’s E3 stage to show off the incredibly ambitious No Man’s Sky. After that announcement, gaming communities and publications started desperately searching for more information explaining what this game actually was. The level of secrecy and perceived ambition surrounding No Man’s Sky generated a level of hype that could only led to some disappointment along the way. Regardless of what fantasies we all created with No Man’s Sky, we have it available to resolve some of the clouded mystery. Simply put, No Man’s Sky is a survival game with procedural generated content in an incredibly gigantic universe.

The opening load screen shows you traveling through the universe with random galaxy names showing up as it finds the position of your avatar. Once you’re brought into existence, you're able to explore the planet you’ve crash landed on. You’re introduced to Atlas, a robotic guidance system similar to a Ghost from Destiny, who’ll help guide you to each objective or any waypoint you discover. Around you're starting position is a save point and a crashed ship that’s in dire need for repair. With a mining tool by your side, you set off to explore this unknown planet and gather the resources needed to rebuild the broken portions of your gun, such as the scanner and combat functions, and to fix up your junk ship.

My experience with No Man’s Sky was met with a bit of frustration right out of the gate. If you pre-ordered the game, they give you a code for a ship that looks like an X-Wing clone. The game pesters you non-stop to redeem the code in the menu. After a couple of hours of playing, I started checking on various dedicated community websites to see where I could obtain antimatter for my warp drive. It turns out if you redeem your pre-order ship before obtaining your warp drive blueprints, the game won’t ever let you complete this task and therefor breaks the quest string needed to obtain other items in the game.

So I had to start over. Usually I’m too annoyed with a game to start over, but I felt like I didn’t accomplish too much in my first couple of hours anyway. Most of my initial time was spent learning what I needed to get done and looking at every single plant or organic species in my vicinity. On my second run through, I had basic knowledge of what I should be doing so my original 2-hours was trimmed to a mere 20-minutes.

There are a lot of resources to harvest for crafting and not every planet or galaxy has exactly what you need. My first world was full of gold deposits while the next galaxy hardly had any at all. Since No Man’s Sky randomizes what resources are accessible on different planets, you don’t really know what to expect. On the surface, it doesn’t look like there’s much to the crafting system. You’ll need to locate blueprints throughout your playtime by checking out outposts, helping aliens, and solving small puzzles to get anything out of the crafting. The more you play, the more the game opens up to you.

Resources are stacked in small groups which will cause you to micromanage your inventory. Until you locate drop ships that have suit upgrades, you’re stuck with a limited supply of slots. Your crafted upgrades and suit accessories take up inventory slots, making your already limited space even more limited. Over time this becomes less of an issue, but at the beginning it’s quite annoying. I was spending a good deal trashing items that were worth credits—the game’s currency—to make room for the necessities to power your mining tool or fuel your ship.

The planets in this game are so big that you’re never really out of resources to harvest. And by huge planets, I mean gargantuan. It wasn’t until I left my world’s atmosphere did I full appreciate just how massive each planet really is. You can’t just run across the entire world in a few hours. It would probably take you days to go from one side of a planet to the other. And that’s every single planet you visit. If you thought you felt small in real life, you feel absolutely microscopic in No Man’s Sky.

Everything from space to land has something to do on it. On the ground, you’ll help aliens with various tasks, scanning life forms and mastering botany, learn various words in languages from relics, mine materials, and look for more blueprints and spaceships. In space, the game turns into a mining world sometimes filled to the brim with space pirates who attack on sight. They can turn into an annoyance as they’ll swarm you and it’s hard to get away. They’re usually in areas where you’ll have freighters warping into your area carrying valuable containers full of various treats.

Traveling between plants is seamless without any load times except for the opening sequence and maybe warping to a new solar system. It’s incredible experiencing it your first time. If No Man’s Sky did anything above and beyond, it was making a galaxy that feels like one. Over time the excitement will be more limited than the beginning of your adventure, but that’s to be expected in a galaxy with some 18 quintillion planets to explore without millions of variables in planet life, animals, aliens and atmospheres. Eventually you’re going to experience repetition. I wish it took longer to experience it though.

This is a real problem if you’re quickly zipping through the universe and just trying to “beat the game” rather than exploring and looking for something in every nook on each planet. I was on a planet that I rather enjoyed and spent about 3-4 hours on it alone. If you’re okay with doing repetitious quests and events for a chance to get better gear or ships, then each planet can last you a long time before you need to move on. It depends on what you’re looking for out of No Man's Sky. I personally hope they patch in more variety such as how worlds are formed and what my goals are on each planet. Most of the planets I’ve ran into have been absent of any water. It'd be nice to have more Earth-like planets with deranged dinosaurs and a maybe few volcanoes.

Creatures could use some work as you’ll run through most of the variety after a weekend of consistent playing. I still discover freakishly ugly animals that look like Jurassic Park abominations from time to time, but the more I play the less exciting the wild life becomes. Plus, they're not very intelligent creatures which serve no actual purpose other than being an animated object on your screen. It’s also extremely boring being a botanist in No Man’s Sky. After my 3^rd planet, I had already seen practically every variation of modeled plant life there was. Maybe they’ll have some new stuff patched into the game in the future and turn this game into the space Minecraft it deserves to be.

It’s still not off-putting for me as every time I launch the game, I feel like I’m greeted with something new or interesting I didn’t notice before. But there’s still a lot of be desired and it’s not a perfect game. Even some of the features are flat out missing in this game (see a few paragraphs below). The most controversial of them is the lack of any multiplayer. Sean Murray was never clear on what multiplayer elements you’d experience, but had stated a few times that you’d be able to randomly run into other players and even stated it would be an experience like PlayStation's Journey. That isn’t true. On launch day, two players were on a planet at the same location and couldn't see each other which sparked online outrage in the No Man’s Sky community. And rightfully so.

Let me be perfectly clear: No Man’s Sky isn’t a multiplayer game. It’s a single player experience through and through. The closest you’re going to get to experiencing multiplayer in its current state is by running into a discovered planet that was named and uploaded by another player. That’s it.

Unless the two players—and even more players now—have experienced a bug, then anything mentioned about running into other players isn’t truthful. And it’s a shame that no one at Hello Games would clear this up before accepting money for their game.

To make matters worse if you planned on enjoying this game on your PC, you might want to think twice about your decision. This is a console port to PC and not a very good one. PC gamers that are experiencing issues are either having issues with framerate, screen tearing, or it just flat out crashing. They’re working on it but the best way to play right now is on PlayStation 4. You’ll have a (mostly) 30FPS experience in a jaggy world with less crashing and an equal amount of geometry pop-in.

With all the positives and some negatives I've written about, I still need to be readdress that No Man's Sky was falsely advertised on several different levels and I'm not letting that slide. You can expect some things to not make it in the game on launch. Almost every game has some sort of promise that doesn't fall through. But Sean Murray's promises are a level almost equal to Peter Molyneux. The multiplayer was a lie; you can't land on asteroids; there's not multiple ship classes; there's not any crashed freighters on planets; and many more but more minor issues. It's not something that should be taken lightly.

That being said, I can't express that the time I'm having with the game is fun since it still has a sense of discovery and mystery. No Man’s Sky is a great exploration game that I’m having a blast playing, despite its flaws and limitations. I find that the people that are having the most fun with the game are taking their time exploring every nook and cranny until a planet or system gets boring. I can only hope Hello Games patches this game with more than just bug fixes. I can’t really answer if this game is a huge let down because it depends on who you ask. I feel there’s more to do than I actually originally thought, but I’m still bummed out about the lack of any real multiplayer. It’s not the best there is in survival games nor the best there is as a sandbox/crafting game. But it’s a game that does seamless space travel beyond my expectations and has a lot more depth than some gamers are making out. It's a very slow-burn.

PC gamers, I feel your pain. I’d recommend Starbound as a 2D alternative to scratch your sci-fi itch until they work out the bugs in No Man's Sky. While I think this is a great addition to the PS4 library, I currently can’t recommend this on PC until the bugs are ironed out.